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to the various offices. It takes two men a week to wind and service something in the
region of three hundred palace clocks; there are two thousand electric lightbulbs
regularly needing replacing. Crawfie discovered the Vermin Man and his grisly
contraption, the ‘sticky-trap’. This was a piece of cardboard with a lump of aniseed in
the middle surrounded by a sea of treacle; the mouse, lured by the smell of the aniseed,
became stuck in the treacle trying to reach it and was then despatched by the Vermin
Man. Crawfie, less accustomed to the place than Elizabeth, felt uncomfortable there. The
wind moaned in the chimneys and the family apartments were separated from each
other by interminable corridors. Electric light had only recently been installed and
switches had been placed in odd and inconvenient places – Crawfie’s bedroom light
could be turned on or off only by a switch outside in the passage some two yards from
her door. Behind the gilt of the state apartments parts of the Palace were dilapidated.
When the housemaid came to draw Crawfie’s curtains, the whole thing, pelmet and all,
collapsed on the floor. When the King showed his daughters the schoolroom on the top
floor facing the Mall, unhappy memories of his own schooldays there overwhelmed him.
Taking one look at the gloomy room, its windows barred by the heavy stone balustrades
outside, he turned away, closed the door and said, ‘No, that won’t do.’
None the less, Buckingham Palace seemed like home to the King; he had lived there
for thirteen years before his marriage. Characteristically, Edward VIII had never liked it.
To him the building had a dank, musty smell and, as he wrote in his memoirs, he never
lost the feeling of not belonging there. No doubt the ghost of his father lingered, a
disapproving shadow to his eldest son but a comforting memory to George VI and his
family. Absolute quiet had reigned in the Palace while George V and Queen Mary lived
there, an oasis of nineteenth-century calm in twentieth-century London; the arrival of
the new family brought the place to life. For Elizabeth too the Palace was familiar
territory. The children were excited by the move and enjoyed rearranging their stable of
toy horses in the long corridor outside their rooms. They liked racing down the passages
to visit their parents. ‘People need bicycles in this place,’ Elizabeth remarked; Margaret
used to ride her tricycle down the corridors. The King had their rocking-horses placed
outside his study so that he could hear the children playing on them. After the dreary
square of grass behind No. 145 the huge Palace gardens, including a large lake
inhabited by ducks, were a delight. Another favourite place was a small hill at the end
of the garden, from which they could look down on the everyday world outside as they
had at No. 145. There were always crowds outside the Palace, gazing up as though
expecting something to happen. From behind the lace curtains the Princesses stared
back, just as fascinated. The fact that from now on there would always be crowds
looking at them as if they were rare beasts (which, in a sense, they were) was something
that they had come to accept as normal.
The King and Queen occupied the pink and gold Belgian suite on the ground floor
while the apartments that had been George V’s and Queen Mary’s were redecorated.
When Queen Mary had moved out to Marlborough House after her husband’s death, she
had thriftily taken the silk wall coverings from two of her sitting-rooms, the ‘Green Tea